Orientalist film reduces non-Westerners to curios valued only for Anglo consumption

Evidence

DeMille’s movie functions as a narrative about the dangers that non-Christians pose to “civilized” Westerners. Like other Orientalist forms, movies provide a space for virtual tourism as the “subject of a voyeuristic tour that reifies foreigners so that they are reduced to the level of curios produced in consumer capitalism and, more to the point, assigned a low rate of exchange favorable to Anglo-Saxon spectators.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 600